Would you Adam and Eve it?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 September

Not much to say about Salma and the Apple (2011), except that, as I was feeling, I'd probably have watched Salar the Salmon in preference to this story set in Iran, which I walked out of just now : Rafi Pitts' The Hunter (2010) (about which I have written elsewhere), rightly or wrongly, spoke to me far more about modern Iran at this festival two years ago.

Maybe if the subtitles had been more accessible - everyone wants to 'get off' the taxi, the wheelbarrow is a tricycle, and one sometimes had to read two full lines of text and yet follow the rest of the screen - it would have helped, but the cinematography, too, right from the opening shot with the son on the horizon at daybreak, is extremely variable. One shot is in sharp focus, the next (say, taking in the wider scene of the garden, or the tree with the eponymous fruit) not far short of fuzzy. (And the music is portentous in a way that draws attention to the over-reached pretensions of the story.)

In Habbib Bahmani's take on Pilgrim's Progress meeting Isaac Newton discovering gravity, I did my best to engage with Hadi Dibaji as Sadegh, suddenly back home from years away, but I just wanted to save myself for something better - and there will be much better things, even to-day - and not find out how all these chance encounters, laden with significance by the barrow-load, unfold.


PS Oh, and forgot to say that, which I could not put out of my mind, there was a resemblance in appearance, naivety and enthusiasm to James McAvoy as Valentin in The Last Station (2009), which did not help me...


PPS Just another poke at the subtitles: someone might just about be called, or describe himself as, a clergyman nowadays, but the words have a ring about them (the 'clergy' part) that makes it about as apt for him to be a cleric. If the translation did happen to want to catch at an archaic air, OK, but I doubt it...


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The Hunter re-emerges

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


17 December

I cannot say when this happened, because I'm not always looking out for the latest releases (and prefer to wait a little longer, when, at Fopp, at least, one can rely on the price dropping), but Artificial Eye have brought out the DVD of The Hunter.

So I will have the chance to go back and see whether my understanding of the film works with a second viewing - I hope so, but also not, because it will be, then, like a piece that I once wrote in which the narrator of the history of The Spoonbill Press was supposed to be revealing, unbeknownst to himself sometimes, so many little secrets, infamies even, but the writing was so damn'd subtle that no one knew what it was really about and, thus, why it might be amusing.

If it does, and at the risk of spoiling things after all this time (since I posted my review publicly, one person has valued it), I might just go public with my account of why what happens does happen, because I do not not believe that everyshting (?) is as it may seem...


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